When people talk about classic country songwriters, they often speak of Harlan Howard, Cindy Walker, Jerry Chesnutt and Dallas Frazier.

But Gordon Lightfoot — best known in America for FM radio hits such as “Sundown” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” and best known in his native Canada as the nation’s “folk laureate” — has numerous, three-minute claims to classic-country-songwriter status.

“The first time someone from Nashville cut a song of mine was Marty Robbins, with ‘Ribbon of Darkness,’” said Lightfoot, 71. “He sped it up and did a wonderful job, and I still use his arrangement to this day. After Marty, I got to meet quite a few Nashville guys, and I made a couple of albums down there. George Hamilton IV had one of the best cuts, on ‘Early Morning Rain.’ I came down and did Johnny Cash’s television show, and got to meet Kris Kristofferson and Mickey Newbury and Waylon Jennings and a lot of others.”

Lightfoot was a driven, voracious writer who put out 13 albums in his career’s first 10 years, between 1966 and 1976. In the new century, he has been slowed by a near-fatal abdominal hemorrhage, though not by the recent Internet rumors of his death. Greatly exaggerated, those.Continue reading →

Master honky-tonk stylist Carl Smith, the dashing “Country Gentleman” who was among the most successful Nashville-based artists of the 1950s, died Saturday, Jan. 16 at his home in Franklin. The Country Music Hall of Famer was 82.

“From the minute he came out, I wanted to look like him, tried to comb my hair like him and learned every song he ever recorded,” Waylon Jennings once said of Mr. Smith, who retired from music in 1978 and bred champion cutting horses for decades. Many other artists of Mr. Smith’s generation spent the 1980s and '90s working on stages. Mr. Smith preferred spending time on his 500-acre Franklin ranch, with his horses, his dogs and, until her death in 2005, his wife, singer Goldie Hill.

“I just wanted to play cowboy,” Mr. Smith told The Tennessean’s Tim Ghianni in 2003. “My philosophy is doing what I want to do.”

In his youth, what Mr. Smith wanted to do was sing country music. He was born in 1927 in the small East Tennessee town of Maynardville, also the birthplace of Roy Acuff. As a boy, he listened to Knoxville radio stations WROL and WNOX, and to the Grand Ole Opry, and he mowed neighbors’ lawns to pay for guitar lessons. In 1944, while in high school, he began singing on Cas Walker’s WROL radio show.

Three years later, after a Navy stint and several other radio residencies, he appeared on the Grand Ole Opry as a guest of Hank Williams. In May of 1950, he signed a recording contract with Columbia Records and a radio contract with WSM.

“My first job at WSM was six or seven days a week at 5:15 in the morning,” he told The Tennessean. “The announcer would put me on and then just leave. I started being on the Opry pretty regularly. They didn’t say you were a ‘member’ of the Opry back then. You just were on it or you weren’t.”Continue reading →

Studying the life and work of outlaw country legend Waylon Jennings is full of reward, both in good times for the ears and an understanding of how someone might stand against accepted ways on principle, and create genre- and career-defining works. His body of work, if you're coming late to the party, is also pretty hefty to parse.

Good news, then, for newcomers wanting to dig in or longtime fans looking for fresh perspective: Collectors' Choice is reissuing six Jennings albums that span eras in his career, teamed in three-double disc sets and all with extensive liner notes from historian Colin Escott. They're set to hit stores on November 24.

The reissues: 1966's Folk-Country paired with 1967's Waylon Sings Ol' Harlan, '67's Love of the Common People with '68's Hangin' On and 1970's Waylon and Singer of Sad Songs.

The collections span from Jennings' early years up through the point in his career where he grew weary of Nashville's common quick-turn approach to music.Continue reading →

Billy Joe Shaver looked out of a windowpane into his front yard, and the demons were dancing in a circle.

"This was way back yonder, in the early 1990s, when I lived in Nashville," said Shaver, the legendary singer-songwriter now living in Texas. "Oh man, I had demons all over the place. It was all in my head, but I couldn't tell that."

Shaver's new Everybody's Brother album includes a song called "Get Thee Behind Me Satan," a duet with John Anderson that recalls "demons that were in me" that had "turned me wrongside out." The song is another example of a writing style that finds him recalling past adventures anytime he might otherwise be stuck for a story. That's the way he wrote gems including "Georgia on a Fast Train" and "Blood Is Thicker Than Water."

"I call back things and they somehow fit, and I never have had that . . . what do you call it? That writer's block," said Shaver, 68, sitting in a room at West End Avenue's Hampton Inn. "See, so much (stuff) happens to me anyway, just naturally. It's tough, but really I'm blessed with that. I know God gave me that."Continue reading →